Audio import/export (wav) problem

[Maestral]

The main difference I'm addressing with animatic is the difference between straightforward animating and animating through key poses (metaphorically, of course).
When applicable, straightforward is an unbeatable approach but if you have dialogues between characters and separated audio files which you have to align to these scenes - an animatic (timed set of an image sequence/storyboard, more like time markers rather than anything else) could come in handy. Then you'll have not just a 'time sheet' on your timeline but an opportunity to check if the scene alone is working (too long, too short, is there enough time for secondary actions... and stuff like these) - which should be seen as time-saving since you still did not make the animation hence making changes is easier and faster - therefore you've had saved some time.

Also, there's a doubt about which goes first - audio or animation. Far as I know, it's still seen as a hen/egg paradox and if you have a stand on that matter - usually there's no room for further discussion

[ggoblin]

Most of my jobs usually skip the animatic anyway: there's the script, there's the storyboard (very sketchy), that's it. I speak the layout (temp) sound myself, mostly because client can't decide wether to pull out the money for a professional voice artist (in the end I often speak the VO myself, which is not too bad). Final timing of everything is done in video editor.

Thats interesting Slowtiger, please share your workflow and how you split between what is done in Moho and what is done in the video editor?

Does your typical job include lipsynced animation? For me that essentially determines where the timing happens - once the character is lipsynced everything else is timed around that. Gaps between sentences can be changed but thats about it, and the script is usually such that so much is packed in such a short duration that there is hardly any gaps to play with. And since the lipsyncing happens in Moho, the timing happens in Moho.

In my earlier jobs I was doing most of the work in the video editor, just bringing in the animation from Moho. But I think the combination of getting more confident working in Moho and feeling I can trust it to deliver, I started doing more in Moho and less in the video editor. Thats when I started suggesting using talking head characters rather than just a voice over. Also I found when I was doing the composition, effects etc in the video editor and something didnt work and we had to go back to Moho to make changes - that really cost us. It was cheaper to keep such iterative cycles within one application. So now it seems everything is done in Moho apart from the final touches like subtitles and background music.

But I am not convinced I have the balance right, and then there is the inner voice telling me that for my type of animation something like After Effects is more suitable - bit the bullet, ditch Moho for AE and then everything can just be done in AE, no need for even the video editor as most of my videos are only around 2 minutes long. So I am very interested to learn how others who have more experience have struck the right balance for their requirements.

[ggoblin]

The main difference I'm addressing with animatic is the difference between straightforward animating and animating through key poses (metaphorically, of course).
When applicable, straightforward is an unbeatable approach but if you have dialogues between characters and separated audio files which you have to align to these scenes - an animatic (timed set of an image sequence/storyboard, more like time markers rather than anything else) could come in handy. Then you'll have not just a 'time sheet' on your timeline but an opportunity to check if the scene alone is working (too long, too short, is there enough time for secondary actions... and stuff like these) - which should be seen as time-saving since you still did not make the animation hence making changes is easier and faster - therefore you've had saved some time.

I must admit in my explainer type videos I've only ever had one character speak so have no experience, and have not even considered, what level of complexity dialogue between characters introduces. Thank you for pointing this out.

Also, there's a doubt about which goes first - audio or animation. Far as I know, it's still seen as a hen/egg paradox and if you have a stand on that matter - usually there's no room for further discussion

Regards audio or animation, if there is any lipsyncing to be done, or if we paid someone to do the voice over, then for me audio wins every time - we work around that - its cheaper

[Greenlaw]

Also please have a little regard for those of us one-man teams working to very tight deadlines who dont have the luxury of an animatic.

Sure, anyone is free to work their own way and I understand that some artists thrive when their projects aren't so tightly structured.

But in defense of the animatic...

Even though my day job is working at a studio, I still create personal 'one-man' projects at home, and I always create an animatic for my own animated shorts.

My personal experience is that making a short film is MUCH easier and more likely to get done when I have a blueprint to follow.

Even my child, who has been making animated shorts since they were in elementary school, takes the time to create an animatic before animating anything. They may have first learned this from me but they made it habit while working with other kids creating animated YouTube videos. Here's an early example from when they were 10 years old:

'Chasing My Dream'

and here's their animatic for the short:

'Chasing My Dream' Animatic

Because my child made an animatic, they were able to get the project done in a month working on it after school and on weekends. (I admit I offered some technical advice along the way but all the work is theirs.)

IMO, having an animatic is not a "luxury". It's not difficult or costly to create one, and creating one can preemptively solve potential problems that can slow down the animation process or prevent the project from getting completed at all. For me, I would go as far to say creating an animatic first is essential, whether I'm working as a one-man shop or on a team at a big studio.

One more example: This was my first personal Moho project and it was purely a 'hobby' project I made before I got a job at a studio to create 2D cartoon animation. My wife created the background paintings but I did designs, rigging, animation, and everything else. (Well, except music...I paid a musician for the score)...

'Scareplane' (2014)

...and here's my animatic...

'Scareplane' Animatic

As you can see, I followed the animatic pretty closely. For the most part, as I completed each scene, I just dropped the Moho footage on top of the animatic footage in the video edtor timeline, and once I had overcut every scene, the project was done. Not counting the time I spend learning Moho, the whole thing got done in about 6 weeks working on a personal laptop during my lunch breaks, and at home in the evenings and during the weekend. (Actually, I did a lot of the work hanging out at the public library on weekends--it's really quiet there with minimal distractions. Of course you should wear headphones when working with audio if you don't want to get shushed or kicked out.) Not saying this was easy to make but it was certainly made easier because I had an animatic.

Creating the animatic also guided my design and rigging decisions. Since I could see in advance what I needed for each scene, I didn't risk unnecessarily over-engineering my rigs or drawing anything that wasn't going to work or get used in the short. In my experience with past personal projects, whenever I tried to create a short like this by 'winging it' without a clear plan, the project usually wound up abandoned.

Anyway, just my two cents. Hope it's helpful to someone.

[slowtiger]

As I said, most of that stuff was voice-over only, for that I only need the scene length in seconds and start animating, usually there are holds at beginning and end, and the final trimming happens in video editor.

I finalize everything in video editor (Final Cut here) because it deals with already rendered footage, has comfortable means of sound editing, and dissolves and stuff, and it renders much faster than Moho (because it's all videos already). Also for larger productions there is a lot of sound processing done in post, like adding room effect for dialogue, not to mention FX and music, and all that mixed in 5.1 or even 7.1 Dolby. And I often did different language versions.

For lip sync it's different. This is where I need to cut the soundtrack (temp or final) of the animatic into the bits which go into each individual scene. This also means no changes in timing anymore, it has to be fixed at this state. Right now I'm in the process of a bigger project with 3 parts of about 15 min each, lots and lots of talking heads, and I have to prepare all that stuff for the team. I have temp and final sound of the voices, the final cut will be done elsewhere, I just have to deliver the rendered scenes with temp sound, and the animatic, and they continue from there.

[Greenlaw]

I absolutely agree with SlowTiger!

For lip sync, I try to use the final dialog recording in my animatic so I can animate the lip sync accurately in Moho. If I have to use a temp track (also called a scratch track), I try to make sure the reading is close what I want for final. For example, if I'm making a Brudders cartoon, I might read Sister's dialog for the scratch track and have my child read the same lines for the final when they're available (hopefully before I begin lip sync animation.)

After the animation is cut over the animatic track in my video editor, I can start tweaking the audio mix. Sometimes I find slipping the audio a frame or two can improve the sync for some reason...but usually it's spot-on to what I animated. Having all your audio bits on the timeline as separate clips and being able to manipulate each one individually is super important...sometimes it can save me going back and reanimating scenes.

As for rendering handles, I used to add 5 frames head and tail back when I was doing VFX work. It was always helpful to have that flexibility in editing. But when I started working mainly in 2D cartoon animation, I don't often add handles to my animation because each scene is already synced to the animatic's duration and audio when I animate it. At home I might add 1 or 2 frames to my footage so I can play with it a little in editing, but at my workplace I'm rarely asked to provide handles.

[ggoblin]

Wow, you have a very talented family Greenlaw. The only problem is your animatics are so good I would be tempted to pass them off as the final animation

So if I understand correctly you create the animatic in the video editor by chopping the audio bits on the timeline, align to the video/ stills from the storyboard and export that as the animatic. And then after you create your animation over the animatic in Moho, scene by scene, you bring the seperate scenes into the video editor and then fine tune the exisitng audio bits on the timeline to match the animated scenes? And if the final audio is not ready then the animatic can have a scratch track which you lipsync to, and later you can substitue for the real audio track and fix the lipsync in the video editor, no reanimating needed? Or do you adjust syncing in Moho and then bring it back into the video editor?

In my workflow the lipsyncing is all done in Moho, once it leaves Moho there are no further fine tunning the lipsync on the timeline. And there can be no lipsyncing until I get the final audio file. The audio file is cleaned, normalised, etc before being chopped into bits for lipsyncing, so there is no further adjustment.

What I dred most is going back to Moho once I've created the animation and its already in the video editor. For motion graphics, rendering in Moho is very time consuming on my system, best to only do it once at full resolution, full quality, motion blur enabled etc. I haven't used comps, perhaps that might be away to reduce cumulative rendering times.

A lot of food for thought, maybe I will try an animatic for my next longer project. Thank you.

[Maestral]

... And then after you create your animation over the animatic in Moho, scene by scene, you bring the seperate scenes into the video editor and then fine tune the exisitng audio bits on the timeline to match the animated scenes? And if the final audio is not ready then the animatic can have a scratch track which you lipsync to, and later you can substitue for the real audio track and fix the lipsync in the video editor, no reanimating needed? Or do you adjust syncing in Moho and then bring it back into the video editor?

You've mixed a few things...

HD audio is in the background of the animatic (made in some video editor) and in Moho, you'd import and use an animatic with (due to import limitations) somewhat lower quality audio (scratch track) for a reference only (as in visual and audio references).

"And if the final audio is not ready..." <--- that would be a hen/egg paradox per see If you don't have all audios ready when you're making an animatic and you start animating in Moho - some further editing awaits you in both, Moho and video editor. Not necessarily but highly likely.

Some fine tuning for lipsync can be made later on in the video editor where you have the audio tracks already aligned and separated (from making an animatic). Once you import silent video or ImgSeq from Moho, into the video editor - some slight shifting of audio clips in the video editor is not much of a trouble.

[ggoblin]

Thank you Slowtiger for sharing your workflow.

As I said, most of that stuff was voice-over only, for that I only need the scene length in seconds and start animating, usually there are holds at beginning and end, and the final trimming happens in video editor.

I finalize everything in video editor (Final Cut here) because it deals with already rendered footage, has comfortable means of sound editing, and dissolves and stuff, and it renders much faster than Moho (because it's all videos already). Also for larger productions there is a lot of sound processing done in post, like adding room effect for dialogue, not to mention FX and music, and all that mixed in 5.1 or even 7.1 Dolby. And I often did different language versions.

Yes I can understand that if there is a lot of audio editing to do done then its better to do it in the video editor where the animation is already rendered, rather than tie it to a re-render cycle, as would be needed in Moho.

For lip sync it's different. This is where I need to cut the soundtrack (temp or final) of the animatic into the bits which go into each individual scene. This also means no changes in timing anymore, it has to be fixed at this state. Right now I'm in the process of a bigger project with 3 parts of about 15 min each, lots and lots of talking heads, and I have to prepare all that stuff for the team. I have temp and final sound of the voices, the final cut will be done elsewhere, I just have to deliver the rendered scenes with temp sound, and the animatic, and they continue from there.

So you lipsync to the temp voice-over and it will translate to the final voice-over without reanimating? I have not tried that.

Thank you.

[Greenlaw]

...The only problem is your animatics are so good I would be tempted to pass them off as the final animation

Ha ha, thanks!

An animatic doesn't need to be that animated though. For example, my child's animatic for their project hardly had any animation but it served its purpose: establishing composition, length, and audio cues for each scene.

Re: workflow: you have the general idea. For example: Sienna exported each animatic scene from the video editor and used each 'clip' as a reference in TV Paint. Low quality image is fine since it's just for reference; uncompressed is preferred for audio for frame accuracy...important for lip sync. And as they completed each animation in TV Paint, they rendered the footage without audio and this was imported to the video editor and place on top of the corresponding animatic footage. Exporting audio from the animation program is unnecessary since the audio already exist in the video editor. When all of the animatic footage is covered up with the final footage, the animation is more or less completed.

If the animatic's timing and audio is more or less complete, you shouldn't have re-render too many scenes. This is why creating a good animatic is so important...it removes a lot of uncertainty from the animation stage.

[ggoblin]

You've mixed a few things...

HD audio is in the background of the animatic (made in some video editor) and in Moho, you'd import and use an animatic with (due to import limitations) somewhat lower quality audio (scratch track) for a reference only (as in visual and audio references).

Ah okay that makes sense. I misunderstood, I thought the scratch track was a temporary persons voice,not the final persons voice lol. But why import a lower quality audio, has it previously been confirmed that the import is of a lower quality? I never heard of this until it was mentioned here by Bebemustacio.

"And if the final audio is not ready..." <--- that would be a hen/egg paradox per see If you don't have all audios ready when you're making an animatic and you start animating in Moho - some further editing awaits you in both, Moho and video editor. Not necessarily but highly likely.

Some fine tuning for lipsync can be made later on in the video editor where you have the audio tracks already aligned and separated (from making an animatic). Once you import silent video or ImgSeq from Moho, into the video editor - some slight shifting of audio clips in the video editor is not much of a trouble.

Yes thats what I assumed would be needed, makes sense. So then the argument still stands that perhaps its better to nail the final best quality lipsync audio (if available) in Moho to avoid further adjustment

[Greenlaw]

Clarification about my 'scratch' audio: Ideally, I'll have the final dialog recording in my animatic before I start animating the scenes with lip sync. I'll record a temp dialog audio (scratch track) only when the actor doing the voice isn't immediately available to record their part.

If I'm animating lip sync to the scratch audio, it's with the understanding that I may be re-animating this part later when the final audio is available. Or more likely, I'll simply hold off animating these scenes until I get the final audio. It's not necessary to animate the scenes in sequence. In fact, I usually animate the scenes in batches grouped by similarity, like scenes with the same character and background art.

To me, Moho renders pretty quickly, but if time was an issue I'd render the character without a mouth, and after I get the final audio I'd animate only the mouth and composite that element later. (I've done that for 3D animation, which takes a lot longer to render than 2D animation in Moho.) Moho's Layer Comps with Moho Exporter makes doing this easy.

[Maestral]

^ Sorry for the intrusion - went for the topic relevant interpretation of the scratch track - as something temporal.

[ggoblin]

Clarification on my 'scratch' audio: Ideally, I'll have the final dialog recording in my animatic before I start animating the scene with lip sync. I'll record a temp dialog audio (scratch track) only when the actor doing the voice isn't immediately available to record their part.

If I'm animating lip sync to the scratch audio, it's with the understanding that I may be re-animating this part later when the final audio is available. Or more likely, I'll simply hold off animating these scenes until I get the final audio. It's not necessary to animate the scenes in sequence. In fact, I usually animate the scenes in batches grouped by similarity, like scenes with the same character and background art.

Yes that makes a lot of sense to me.

To me, Moho renders pretty quickly, but if time was an issue I'd render the character without a mouth, and after I get the final audio I'd animate only the mouth and composite that element later. (I've done that for 3D animation, which takes a lot longer to render than 2D animation in Moho.)

Thats a clever idea, animate without the mouth.

But in my talking head video, to make it more interesting (or less boring ) I have secondary motion linked to the audio - for example head tilting for emphasis on louder words, occasional slight head turns, eye blinking at end of sentences, commas, etc, other eye movements, eyebrows to show emotion, etc. Thats why for me once the lipsync is done its set in stone - no changes, everything works around it, as its crazy to go back to edit that sea of keyframes controlling all the secondary motions linked to the lipsync.

BTW for timing of animated eye movements I found this useful: https://www.bloopanimation.com/blinking-animation/

[alanthebox]

But in my talking head video, to make it more interesting (or less boring ) I have secondary motion linked to the audio

Have you seen/used this method by Chucky?

https://youtu.be/6dcZXYlLK4A